‘You Can’t Fatten a Pig by Weighing It!’

Good Morning again, David Elliott here again. This is the first of the 2009 sessions – the 2008 sessions have all been collated and are available from me via the website.
I’d like to wish everyone, of course, a happy new year. Most of us will have been together in social gatherings over the holiday period and in fact this topic is from a conversation at one of those gatherings where somebody very indignantly said “you can’t fatten a pig by weighing it” and continued to go on at some length about the ridiculous amount of administration that is now necessary to retain a job in the education of primary school children in this country.
This got me thinking and many companies suffer from naval gazing in that they spend an awful lot of time rejigging the numbers, figures while somebody else is stealing their market out in the real world. I’m not suggesting for a moment that there shouldn’t be any planning – indeed it would be a sin not to plan what you are going to try to do. However if you spend far too much time rejigging numbers, reappraising whether or not a budget is correct or not, then that is effectively wasted time. And as we said right at the beginning, we don’t fatten a pig by weighing it. In other words, please don’t spend enormous disproportionate amounts of time analysing the business, getting everything looking nice and tidy in big fat documents whilst things are going badly outside in the real world. So please remember for 2009 that you don’t fatten a pig by weighing it. Thank you very much.